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Chapter 95
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lonesome Dove, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Mythology
Family
Luck, Fate, and Chance
The Good Life
The Meaning of Masculinity
Feminine Strength
Summary
Analysis
When Gus comes to, he’s in a bed in a small, hot room. He can hear piano music in the distance. The doctor is there, drunk and dozing in a chair with a bottle of whiskey by his elbow. When Gus wakes him, he introduces himself as Dr. Joseph Cincinnatus Mobley. Dr. Mobley removed Gus’s left leg—the wounded one—but he’s worried that the infection has moved to the right leg, and he wants to amputate that one too. Gus refuses. He says he just wants to listen to the pianist—a sex worker named Dora, it turns out, who is slowly dying of tuberculosis. Dr. Mobley doesn’t understand Gus’s refusal, but he can’t do anything about it; Gus promises to shoot if he comes too close.
Although a stroke of good luck carried Gus to Miles City, it wasn’t enough to rewrite his fate. Now he faces a choice: certain death with one leg still intact or near-certain death with no legs. His predicament speaks to the harshness of life on the frontier—remember that his amputation occurred without anesthesia (although he was thankfully unconscious) or without antibiotics to check the spread of infection. His inglorious death thus contrasts sharply with a life of adventure. But fate has plans for everyone, not just Gus. The book strongly implies that unexplored misfortunes or bad choices have landed many of the denizens of Miles City—including Dr. Mobley and Dora—here on the edge of the world against their will.
Themes
Gus spends the afternoon drinking whiskey and listening to the sad sounds of the piano. Once, when Dora passes by the window, he tosses a $10 gold piece at her. She hurries back into the saloon and resumes playing. Gus drifts off to sleep, waking in the night to the familiar sound of Call walking into the room. Call is upset when he sees that the infection has spread, and he tries to talk Gus into letting Dr. Mobley operate. Again, Gus refuses, even pulling his gun on Call to make his point. He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life as a charity case for Clara and Lorena. Call doesn’t argue, even though he wants to. All he can do is sit with his friend.
Even as he’s dying, Gus still finds it in himself to appreciate the little things in life, like hearing a piano again after months on the trail. When Call arrives, he’s upset—ostensibly at Gus, whose vanity and stubbornness seem responsible for his impending death—but readers can conjecture that he’s also angry at himself. Gus is partly responsible for his present state—he rode into the ambush and has refused a potentially lifesaving operation. But he’s only here in Montana anyway because Call couldn’t get the idea out of his head—and because he refused to stop back by the Yellowstone River. There are bad consequences to Call’s single-minded determination to see a task through, even after it seems foolish.
Themes
Somehow, Gus survives the night. In the morning, he asks Call to take his body back to Texas and bury it in Clara’s Orchard. This trip is exactly the kind of harebrained mission only Call would take on—or be satisfied by. Throughout the day, Gus drifts in and out of consciousness. He writes final letters to Lorena and Clara and asks Call to deliver them. He tells Call he should acknowledge Newt and start to treat him like a son. He wills his share of the herd to Lorena. And he leaves his saddle to Pea Eye—he cut Pea Eye’s up when he was making his crutch. After a while, he falls silent, and eventually Call drifts off to sleep, too. He wakes to find his friend dead.
Even as he lies dying, Gus thinks about the people he cares for, and he does what he can to soothe the suffering he knows they’ll experience in the wake of his death. There are several ways to interpret Gus’s request. One is essentially romantic, and it looks at Gus’s enduring love for Clara and his nostalgia for his youth as the request’s animating factors. Another that the request is a not-so-subtle rebuke of Call’s foolishness—having dragged Gus (metaphorically) all the way up here to the wilderness to die, Gus insists that Call do the right thing and drag him (literally) back home. And one speaks to the love and friendship between the two. This one says that Gus knows his friend all too well, and so he gives him a task to focus on that will play to his strengths and give him reason to keep living even after Gus is gone.
Themes
